personas - w5 · personas, as well as their tactical and strategic use over the long term. personas...

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Personas

3©2013 W5, Inc. All rights reserved.

In today’s evolving marketplace, it is important for companies to have a deep understanding of their current and potential consumers in order to remain relevant and successful. Discrete data and the knowl-edge derived from traditional market research meth-odologies are often not enough to provide a complete picture and true understanding of consumer behaviors, habits, practices, and unspoken motivations.

Developing personas to supplement and give depth to traditional research results provides companies with a better platform for successful, consumer-driven con-cept development, design, and marketing strategies.

This paper is designed to provide an overview of per-sona research, focusing both on the development of personas, as well as their tactical and strategic use over the long term.

Personas are ideation tools that draw upon previous market segmentations, previous quantitative and qualitative research, and new insights obtained from in-depth ethnographic research to provide a more down-to-earth por-trait of the consumer. Personas are fictional consumer archetypes used to address two primary issues faced by organizations when they design new products, services, and communications:

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What are Personas?

Although this whitepaper focuses on the development and use of personas among consumers, personas are also an effective tool for profiling and understanding business end users. Please feel free to contact us for more information regarding the use of personas in a business environment.

An unclear understanding of the intended users of a product or service often leads to a tendency for de-signers to base their design methods and decisions on people similar to themselves.

In other instances, designers are often pressured to meet the highly specific and varied needs of all potential users, which can contribute to an inordi-nately lengthy and expensive design process and potentially overcomplicated end product that does not actually meet the needs of any one user.

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©2013 W5, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

The purpose of persona research is to understand the underlying and even unspoken goals and motivations of key target users, which will lead to a more efficient and focused design process and ultimately a more successful end product. Personas are developed through an in-depth qualitative exploration of a target consumer base, but they do not represent any one individual examined throughout the research process. Rather, a persona is an archetype developed through identifying individuals who share similar characteristics, atti-tudes, and beliefs into one character. This arche-type is then brought to life with detailed personal information – the individual is given a fictitious name, picture, age, social history, and lifestyle details that relate to the product or service in question. Thus, a persona becomes a fictional stand-in who accurately represents the needs and motivations of a much broader swath of users and is more relatable across the organization.

Although the demographic and more superficial details of a persona may seem relatively less important than spoken goals and motivations, they highlight and provide valuable insight into one of the most important goals sought after in persona research – understanding a user’s unspoken needs and unspoken motivations as they relate to certain products or services.

Why Conduct Persona Research?Organizations are often faced with the unenviable task of creating solutions without an understanding of who their consumers are. Too easily new ideas, designs, and communications become detached from consumer needs as companies attempt to arrive at a solution without truly understanding the problem from the consumer’s perspective. Personas benefit organizations by providing a clear, more intuitive understanding of the consumer.

By presenting the complexity of the consumer marketplace as a series of character archetypes, personas offer a simple basis for ideation that can be understood by designers, MARCOM, executives, accountants, and others across the organization. These archetypes, when used throughout the development process, enable an organiza-tion to remain grounded in the actual professional and personal lives of their consumers when designing solutions.

How is Persona Research Conducted?Understanding what consumers do, say, and think will help create robust personas and better allow your orga-nization to bridge the gap between an understanding of who the consumer is and how to design products, brands, and services for their needs. In order to achieve this in-depth understanding of the consumer, W5 utilizes a combination of the following approaches:

SecondaryResearch

Free-Form In-ContextEthnography

Structured In-ContextEthnography

Dena Simmons

Dena Simmons

Age: 28

Status: Married, 2 children

Occupation: Wedding Planner

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Secondary ResearchPersona research often initiates from revisiting previous qualitative and quantitative research engagements, as well as additional secondary research. This data allows researchers to identify gaps in consumer under-standing and design a persona research plan that addresses these gaps and brings the customer to life.

Analysis of Previous Market SegmentationsAlthough persona research must not always flow from quantitative market segmentation, the two research approaches complement one another well, allowing for a greater degree of ROI from your market segmen-tation initiatives. Quantitative market segmentation research allows organizations to identify the consumer groups that exist within the marketplace who may or may not be a viable target for a specific product, service, campaign, or message. However, these segments, often defined by demographics, psychographics, attitudes, lifestyles, and behaviors, rarely afford the depth of understanding needed to fully comprehend underlying consumer motivations that drive attitudes and behaviors.

Persona research allows organizations to bridge the gap between market segments and the design and devel-opment process. Personas, fictional consumer archetypes, are more relatable than market segments, allow-ing management and design teams to better understand needs and motivations, which more efficiently and accurately drive design strategies.

A full analysis of previous market segmentations before initiating persona research allows an organization to identify the highest priority segments based on any number of characteristics, including market size, consump-tion patterns, or purchase likelihood. These high priority segments can then be examined in more detail through in-context qualitative research. This approach allows organizations to focus their persona research on a limited pool of target consumers rather than wasting time examining a broad swath of consumers who are unlikely candidates for their product, service, or communications.

Meta-Analysis of Other ResearchIn addition to examining previous market segmentation initiatives, W5 consultants often study other previously conducted qualitative and quantitative initiatives to immerse themselves in the category, brand, and current communication initiatives. This analysis enables W5 consultants to fully understand an organization’s current situ-ation and role within the marketplace, paint a picture of the competitive landscape, and highlight competitor and industry successes and failures to identify possible areas of opportunity.

Online EthnographyW5 consultants also frequently include online ethnography as part of the research process, analyzing chat room activity, professional websites, blogs, web forums, and additional resources discovered during the research. This allows for a thorough exploration of the internal (consumer-driven) and external (professional-driven and ad-driven) influences on consumer perceptions, considerations, and decision-making processes.

Online ethnography is an ideal methodology for establishing a broader context and understanding of con-sumer lifestyles, as well as their motivations and barriers for using a particular product, brand, or service. An online medium permits a high degree of anonymity and freedom for many individuals who may monitor their thoughts and opinions throughout their day-to-day lives. As such, when individuals express their thoughts, fears, opinions, and questions in an online forum, they are often more effusive and unedited than they may typically be. In addition, an online forum provides a sense of community, allowing individuals to benefit from the collective knowledge of the online society as a whole and thus become experts in a particular field through a non-traditional approach.

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ObservationConsumers’ relationships with their environments are multi-dimensional, and individual consumers are often not fully self-reflective or conscious of the underlying and unspoken forces that may shape their behavior and decision-making processes. Diligent in-context observation allows W5 consultants to delve beneath cognitively apparent motivations and behaviors and identify the more veiled psychographics, attitudes, and motivations that drive that behavior. It is these unspoken psychographics, attitudes, and motivations that become the basis for identifying and differentiating the resulting personas.

Intercept InterviewsIn-context intercept interviews with consumers enable W5 researchers to validate their observations and aug-ment the research with nuanced richness. Intercept interviews typically involve free-form discussions that cover a range of topic areas depending on individual responses and receptivity. The informal nature of intercept interviewing allows for the exploration of topics that meet the study objectives but that may not have been anticipated in the original interview protocol.

Free-Form In-Context EthnographyThe somewhat sterile environment of most qualitative research can encourage “stock” answers and sometimes provide an inaccurate picture of the reality of consumer behavior. As such, the most effective form of persona research utilizes in-context ethnography, taking place when and where consumers interact with a product, brand, or service. In-context ethnography can mitigate the unintentional, but still inherent, bias of con-sumers attempting to describe unconscious behaviors. Putting researchers close to the action allows them to gather insights and observations that might otherwise go unnoticed or unreported by the consumer in a traditional research setting.

Structured In-Context EthnographyIn addition to free-form in-context ethnography, W5 consultants often utilize structured in-context ethnography, which can include pre-recruited interview sessions, group discussions, and participant diaries or other home-work exercises.

Pre-Recruited InterviewsLike free-form intercept interviews, pre-recruited interviews and group discussions are most frequently conducted in the context of where consumers interact with a product, brand, or service, such as at home, in a retail envi-ronment, or in the office environment. The benefit of pre-recruited sessions lies in their more structured nature, enabling W5 consultants to spend an extended amount of time with consumers, exploring their environments, lifestyles, motivations, and behaviors.

Participant ExercisesW5 also frequently uses participant diaries or other homework exercises to encourage research participants to chronicle their day-to-day activities, interactions with a product or service, or benefits and frustrations as they relate to a particular product or service. These exercises challenge research participants to think about their behaviors in a more conscious way than they typically do, adding to the richness of the data obtained through the accompanying interview. These exercises can include diaries, brand association exercises, collection of photographs or other artifacts, etc.

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©2013 W5, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 ©2013 W5, Inc. All rights reserved.7

Case Study

Crafting Communication Strategy with PersonasA leading convenience foods company was interested in redesigning their communication strategy for a popular morning food brand. Ultimately, the client sought to realign their advertis-ing and brand positioning to include a broader family audience, shifting their focus from moms and teens exclusively.

ApproachW5 recommended developing lifestyle and behavior-motivated Personas to guide the client’s understanding of a broader core consumer audience. W5 consultants conducted in-depth in-home interviews and shop-alongs with a diverse representation of select family members. Conversations focused on emotional and rational connections to the food brand and their lifestyle approach, including attitudes toward time management, food decisions, and emotional outlook. Participants were asked to keep diaries of their daily eat-ing habits to help stimulate category engagement and uncover underlying attachments to the brand.

ResultsBased on this extensive, in-context research, W5 developed and presented a set of core Personas and a set of secondary Personas representing a wide range of family roles (father, mother, brother, sister, etc.) and ages. The Personas represented consumer archetypes defined by emotional con-nections to the brand and a general approach to life and happiness. These Personas served as a long-lasting, memorable, and accessible tool the company could refer to when develop-ing communication strategy.

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OverviewThe overview provides a snapshot of the information presented in each of the other categories.

LifestyleThe lifestyle section is a brief narrative containing relevant and telling aspects of each Persona’s daily life.

Category attitudes and behaviorsThe category attitudes and behaviors section provides insight into each Persona’s interaction with products and brands in the category.

Purchase attitudes and behaviorsThe purchase attitudes and behaviors section explains the purchase process for each Persona.

OpportunitiesThe opportunities section highlights how the Client might approach capturing the attention of each Persona.

Once fielding has concluded, there will be a wealth of information about the target consumers. The next step is identifying the spoken and unarticulated lifestyles, behaviors, needs, and motivations that will form the basis of each persona. It is helpful to focus on points of differentiation when organizing the behavior and attitudes of the participants. Each of the participants will fall somewhere within the spectrum of these behaviors and it is here that trends begin to emerge – the same participants will cluster around a smaller set of behavioral variables and the beginnings of a persona begin to take shape.

Personas are an amalgam of lifestyle, motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral trends combined with demographic data and creative flourishes to bring the consumer to life with a name, background, and photograph. For each persona, descriptions of behaviors and attitudes are combined with data added from the research to provide detail and context. For example, in the context of technology, behaviors and attitudes may be described through typical work-flows and usage patterns, while with consumer packaged goods, it might be in a description of a typical day of balancing work, children, and personal lives.

Adding personality and biographic details to your personas will help the consumer become “real,” but it is impor-tant to remember that each persona is firmly grounded in research data and an expression of a group of consum-ers, not just one consumer. Alongside these details are sometimes lists of goals, needs, pain points, and frustrations.

Once personas are developed and described, the goal is to identify the relative weight that will be applied to each individual persona. To do this, personas are identified as primary or secondary, and occasionally negative.

How are Personas Derived from the Research?

How Personas Are PresentedEach Persona is presented using the categories and color coding displayed below:

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Making Personas Work for YouIdentifying these unspoken needs and motivations through qualitative exploration helps a client move beyond how a product or service is used and how often it is used in order to understand many of the whys behind product and service usage. Personas provide a context for usage, which provides immense insight into the design and development process.

This motivation-focused approach to product and service design provides designers with the tools they need to effectively develop products, services, and communications that will be relevant to the needs and preferences of the primary and secondary personas. This approach will mitigate consumers’ frustrations with a given product or service, thereby increasing satisfac-tion and loyalty.

Creating personas can be a revealing process in itself and many organizations learn a great deal about their consumers by distilling key behaviors and attitudes into archetypes. But the true value of personas is in their subsequent use – the application of personas in guid-ing future design, communications, and other relevant consumer experiences. With personas, it becomes easier for organizations to understand who they should be designing for by organizing the demands of con-sumers and providing a basis for ideation.

Persona research and the subsequent adoption of consumer archetypes within an organization fosters simplicity of design. With personas, design is targeted to meet the demands of a single consumer who is an archetype of a larger consumer group – complete with

Because the primary persona is the persona who is most difficult to please, keeping the primary persona’s needs at the focal point of the design process will ensure that the needs of the widest swath of consum-ers are met. The needs and motivations of secondary personas should be considered in the design pro-cess, but secondary personas are easier to design for, and a design that meets the needs of the primary persona will, quite often, meet the needs of all secondary users.

PrimaryThe primary persona is the persona for whom it will be the most difficult to design. The primary persona is often referred to as the “neediest”or “pickiest”persona.

SecondarySecondary personas are the personas developed to be “less picky”than the primary persona. Their needs are often less complex and they are easier to please.

NegativeNegative personas are those who are unlikely to use a product or brand. Identifying negative personas helps an organization identify which personas they should not try to please.

With personas, it becomes easier

for organizations to understand who they should be

designing for by organizing the demands of

consumers and providing a basis

for ideation.

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Design and DevelopmentConcept Ideation Review and Reality Check

a name, biography, and detail about his or her goals, needs, and frustrations related to product, brand, or service interactions in their day-to-day lives. The other option is an incomplete solution that attempts to meet the needs of too many consumers and fails to do one thing well.

The success of personas depends on a commitment by the organization, because in a sense, personas become members of the overall strategic team. They become an integral part of the innovation and ideation process, available for consultation throughout the development, and still there after execution to make sure the organi-zation has been honest about putting consumer demands at the forefront of design.

Personas can be utilized across each step of the creative process:

1. Concept IdeationAt the start of any initiative, personas can be used to understand the current design and innovation issues in the category, as well as how future concepts may or may not address these problems. Understanding the demands and frustrations of archetypes presented as real consumers gives an organization clear direction: to make meeting the demands of the consumers the focus of their design.

During this stage, it is often useful to devise scenarios for consumer interaction with whatever brand, product, or service is being considered and begin to describe its ideal use. This paints a clearer picture of an end product and how it fits into a consumer’s life, lifting static statistics, research results, and market segmentations off the page to inspire developers and creative teams.

2. Design and DevelopmentPersonas should remain a part of the process well beyond the initial ideation stage. The effective use of per-sonas requires an organization to frequently return to these consumer archetypes to guide the development process. This helps teams remain grounded in consumer needs, rather than getting carried away with designing for themselves or designing for all consumers in the marketplace.

3. Review and Reality CheckIt is important to return to the personas for a final sanity check once the concept begins to take shape. This helps organizations understand the implications of their design on how the finished product or service might fit into the lives of their consumers.

Want to know more? Visit our website at www.W5insight.com Contact us at [email protected] or by phone at 919.932.1117 for more information

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W5 is a boutique custom marketing research firm. We focus on answering who, what, when, where, and why people relate to products, services, and brands. W5 conducts full-service marketing research and research strategy services for Fortune 500s and leading advertising agencies.

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personas - w5 · personas, as well as their tactical and strategic use over the long term. personas...

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